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Kecharis ( ) is a 11-13th-century monastery, located 60 km from Yerevan, in the ski resort town of Tsakhkadzor in Armenia. Nestled in the Bambak mountains, Kecharis was founded by a Pahlavuni prince in the 11th century, and construction continued until the middle of the 13th century. In the 12th and 13th centuries Kecharis was a major religious center of Armenia and a place of higher education. Today the monastery has been fully restored and is clearly visible from the ski slopes.
Badly damaged in an earthquake of 1927, reconstruction was not begun by the Armenian SSR until the 1980s. A series of nationwide problems led to a halt in reconstruction for about a decade as the 1988 Leninakan Earthquake hit, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Nagorno-Karabakh War broke out, and Armenia was blockaded by its two Turkic neighbors. As Armenia recovered slowly from these catastrophes, the reconstruction of Kecharis finally resumed in 1998 and finished in 2000 thanks to a donation by an Armenian benefactor from Vienna named Vladimir Harutyunian, in memory of his parents Harutyun and Arsenik.
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